The style of these days seems to be you have to make your own thread. This style is embarrassing for me because I often only get one review done per thing. Nevertheless, here is another of my threads.
Any reviews I post here, I will in the semi-near future also place on IFDB.
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My first review is for take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die by Naarel
I would describe take me to the lakes where all the poets went to die as a linear, emotionally heavy, romantic (in the oldest tradition) semi-animated comic book. And in black and white. It draws strongest on comic book aesthetics for its effects and is dynamic about it, pulling reader’s eyes through the word-emphasising visuals and punctuating them with sound effects, all via a simple eight or sixteen-bit look.
The experience opens with the deliberately-vaguely-depicted narrating character looking over a lake at night. Stars twinkle as she relates the finding of the drowned corpse of Elizabeth, a girl who wrote poetry and whom she seems to have been obsessed with. But obsessed with how? Up close, from a distance or in some other way? The speculating prose has a few abstracting moves up its sleeves as it goes on.
As each frame of image and thought-square of monologue appears, the mechanic is to click to continue, however the click has to be placed on the current speech bubble or latest ellipses to register. I found this requirement distracting. The small target moves in almost every frame, often just two centimetres down the screen. I can understand there might be a sense of wanting to make the reader do something more particular than click anywhere but this is a linear project.
The dynamics of the heroine’s monologue, and also of her later dialogue with Elizabeth’s ghost or echo, are really well executed. For me, the whole was still a little unsatisfying because my taste is that emotion-based stories like this one work with specifics rather than archetypes. This story’s characters and ideas revolve around binaries and twinning; love, hate, free, trapped, creation (writing poetry), destruction (suicide), the narrator, the drowned girl. The name of the eponymous lake (Dioscuri) alludes to the Roman twins Castor and Pollux. And poets, of course, are famous for being suicidal, thought the real situation that created the stereotype - the rise of the romantic tradition and novels like Goethe’s The Sorrows Of Young Werther (1774) - is obviously far more detailed than the content of the lakes. the lakes takes that end point of the concept of romantic suicide as a symbol without complexity. Still, I feel a churl complaining about the arcehtypal style of a story that pretty much declares through its allusion to the Dioscuri that it might be about archetypes. It’s short, establishes a clear visual and editing style during its stay, and is an entirely satisfying construction of its ideas.
-Wade